The premise is that you are “a 28-year-old Sunni woman from Aleppo, and you have two children, a girl aged eight, and a 10-year-old boy. Your husband was killed in a mortar attack three months ago. The air strikes have continued – a recent bomb, you hear, killed 87 children – and you now feel you must try to leave Syria.”

At the end of each section, describing different scenarios faced by real refugees, dictated by legal, logistical and political parameters, you are presented with options. You have to choose carefully, to find refuge. The results are – to say the least – bleak.

The game logic applied to this story is a good way to empathize with the refugee situation, it looks simple, and it’s frustrating enough to gain awareness about the issue and, in the comfort of our homes, step into the refugees’ shoes.

But there’s a bigger picture that extends beyond debating specific executions and business models. These things are about experimentation: necessary design and technical experimentation, something news organizations need to shine at if they want to thrive. That means stopping to shake out how they think about content, again and again.

In Portugal, the setting is pretty much the same as before: only a couple of media companies are regularly producing multimedia journalistic content. This year the major winners of the ObCiber awards were the same as in previous editions: Jornal de Notícias, Público and Rádio Renascença.

Some narrative devices are pretty much well established by now, but there’s still no norm. And that won’t be defined by the end product, but by the investment in production processes.

When Google announced their Media Tools page I immediately tried out some of the available features. These two videos were made using Google Earth Engine Timelapse, and they were quite easy and fast to do. Check out the other tools and examples, these can b quite handy for your stories. And the best part, they’re free.

I always had problems with the right way to use text in video:the right font; the right size. color and background for it; will it have motion and how to make it more appealing; all those questions that bring my design and typography weaknesses up front and center (which is not many times the right way to use screen text).

This 10 minute video presents the experience based perspective of this videographer and I believe every one who has to put a single word, title, caption, credits or whatever on top of moving images should watch this. This is not a upbeat, fast paced tutorial, because Mr.Collins is a particular fellow (I’ve been following his videos for a while now and I enjoy how personal he can get) but it’s a information packed, insightful product. And quite soothing too, he should do another video about background sounds.